From the editor’s desk

The financiers we need

The Churches in Britain have a long and distinguished record of commenting authoritatively on issues of economics and social justice, a tradition embracing the Anglican "Faith in the City" report in 1985, the Catholic statement "The Common Good" a decade later, and the more recent ecumenical document of 2005, "Prosperity with a Purpose".

It is far too soon to expect similarly weighty commentaries on the present financial crisis. But there were certain moral priorities put forward in those church reports which apply to the contemporary situation. All three challenged the assumption that economics and market forces were autonomous and not subject to moral judgement - an assumption that has almost overnight been ditched in favour of a new orthodoxy. It is suddenly acceptable in New York and Washington, as in the City of London and Westminster, to say that governments have a duty to intervene to prevent market outcomes that are disastrous for the common good. But it is worth spelling out why this has been the consensus of Christian social ethics for many years, lest the same mistakes be repeated.

The Gospel asserts clearly the priority of the human over the material. People are more important than wealth: that is what the choice between God and Mammon comes down to. In the Catholic tradition since Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, this has been represented as the priority of labour over capital. This means today that people rather than markets must be the priority.

Relying on market forces ultimately to correct what has gone wrong with the housing market in Britain and America could deprive many people of house and home. If the Government has to become the national landlord, mortgage-lender and housebuilder because the housing market has failed in its task, then so be it. The Government can withdraw if and when it is safe for the profit motive to again drive the supply of affordable homes. The same principle applies to the supply of credit, the lifeblood of a developed economy on which jobs depend. Only the Government can step in if the supply has dwindled to dangerous levels, and that may well mean running a high-street bank.

In the present situation there has evidently been a drying up not just of credit and capital, but of trust and virtue. If trust is to be revived, it will take more than the meae culpae of financiers and speculators, however necessary they may be. It will require a wholesale rethink of the financial system that, being based on greed, has come tumbling down. Such a system will always be unstable.

At a time when governments are being relied on for bail-outs, there is an opportunity for them to insist on much higher standards for the conduct of business. In its turn that insistence depends on the public articulating the values they expect from financial institutions. A system that rewards those who only look as far as the next-quarter figures is not sufficient.

Some other fundamental purpose has to be agreed on, and that may mean a financier has to become a different sort of person, less self-interested, more open to the needs of the community. There are many even in Wall Street and the City who would regard that as a Godsend.